Hi I'm new to this site today the reason my son has a question that I can't answer in one of his test A level papers the question relates to the loss of diversity in the cheetah population the question is " The drastic reduction in the numbers of cheetah results in the loss of genetic diversity in the population. What term is applied to this? Well I've trawled the books and now the internet and can't find a relevant term.

It does seem impossible to provoke folks to actualy read the releavnt literature.

Please see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article ... 533122.pdfIt discusses the role of bottleneck "we show that population bottlenecks are unlikely to be the only factor, even in classic case studies such as the northern elephant seal and the cheetah, where genetic polymorphism is virtually absent."

and offers the most relevant algorithm"Consider the equation that describes the expected loss of heterozygosity over t generations from a population whose effective size is Ne:Ht  H0(1 ÿ 1=2Ne)twhere Ht and H0 are heterozygosity at time t and time zero, respectively.An endangered mammal with a generation length of 5 "

confusedad wrote:Hi I'm new to this site today the reason my son has a question that I can't answer in one of his test A level papers the question relates to the loss of diversity in the cheetah population the question is " The drastic reduction in the numbers of cheetah results in the loss of genetic diversity in the population. What term is applied to this? Well I've trawled the books and now the internet and can't find a relevant term.

Has anyone an answer?

One word that is often applied is viability. Is the population viable? means is there enpugh genetic diversity for it to be able to sustain itself and not become extinct.